Minor (or not so minor) nitpick.

[jadedmusings]

Dear various people on the Internet:

Watchmen was NOT a superhero movie. If anything it's about what happens when you take a handful of real humans - deeply flawed humans of questionable mental stability - and let them live above the law. Hell, in the movie and graphic novel they call them vigilantes for a reason.

So, yes, you were supposed to be horrified by The Comedian raping another "hero." You are supposed to feel unsettled by the whole concept because these people do not possess Superman's or Bruce Wayne's sense of right versus wrong.

YMMV and all that, but it really irks me to place Watchmen in the same category as movies with a much clearer picture of good and evil.

Yours Truly,

Jade

Comments

[loonylupinlover.livejournal.com]

I wonder if people are doing that because it's another comic book movie? Idk. I never read Watchmen or had any familiarity with its canon but I wouldn't call any of them superheroes, except Dr. Manhattan and he wasn't really a hero, he was just super. Like you said the whole feel of the movie and its characters is very different from that of a real superhero movie. As dark as "The Dark Knight" was, and as much as they are trying to give more nuance than just good vs. evil, there's still the fact that even if Batman does evil he is always trying to do good. Unlike the characters of Watchmen, who ricochet around the world leaving havoc in their wake, with no clear attempt to try to help the world. Almost all of them are pretty villainous, even the sympathetic ones. So it doesn't really work as a superhero movie.

And yeah I kinda wanted to stab the Comedian in the eye, or have Rorschach feed him to some dogs or something. -_- Which is also unsettling, but at least it'd be for a good reason.

[jadedissola.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is that you saw people in the movie doing things you equate with superheroes (fantastic vehicles and Doc Manhattan's ability to alter time/space). I can't say that I'd blame people for looking at the previews and thinking, with no knowledge of the original source, "Hey, a cool superhero flick!" However, what I don't think necessarily translated to the movie quite as well as it could have was the fact that all the so-called heroes were ordinary everyday humans. They had no superpowers to speak of (again, excepting Doc Manhattan, and if you look at it in a certain light, Ozymandus's intellect). The original Silk Spectre got into it for the fame and commercial opportunities, as did a few of the others. Nite Owl and Nite Owl II were both doing it because they wanted to make a difference and were probably just about the only two whose sanity was mostly intact and did their work out of a sense of pursuing justice. Rorschach was...well, he was Rorschach; a deeply disturbed man with mommy issues who believed he was doing what was best for everyone. The Comedian was someone who was in it for the thrill, and he was a bad man, but his status as a hero meant he got to get away with (quite literally) murder. (You could make so much commentary on that given what we see with regular old celebrities who run afoul of the law.)

It was never meant to be a feel-good sort of thing. Yes, The Dark Knight was dark and rather disturbing, but as you pointed out, Bruce Wayne was still out to ultimately Do Good, whereas the people in Watchmen were in it for selfish reasons mostly.

And I could go on about this, though probably when I'm more coherent and have re-read the book and re-watched the movie. :)